- February 2010
"And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die."
Vivian Bearing is a professor of 17th century poetry, specialising in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. She is well used to exploring life and death, but now it's her life and death in question, and she's running out of time. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Vivian talks us through her last days and weeks, sharing a wry smile at the world and seeking, always seeking, to unravel the mystery, explain the poem.
Emotional, amusing and ultimately uplifting, 'Wit' is a must-see for anyone who has ever asked the life/death question.
- November 2009
Doctor John Faustus is a desperate man. All alone, frustrated by his studies, he struggles to move on in life. Then, when he's introduced to the Dark Arts a world of opportunities opens up to him; money, women, success. However, there is one condition; signing away his soul to Lucifer, prince of Hell. Faustus enters into the pact and embarks on a fantastical journey, meeting Helen of Troy and the Seven Deadly Sins along the way. But what will result when Lucifer returns to claim on his debt?
First performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, Scott M. Hadley's adaptation partially modernises Marlowe's original script into a dynamic hour of theatre. This fast-paced, visual production offers a bold new interpretation of a classic story.
- June 2009
Laurence and Oliver are best friends. Kit is the girl; she's also Oliver's sister.
A summery, light-hearted drama drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets, Fair Youth is an exciting piece of new student writing that tells a tale of frustrated love, lust and friendship between three friends, all desperately seeking to hold onto those moments of magic that make up the sunshine of life. Can they stop them from slipping away?
- February 2009
- February 2009
The inmates are waiting. Nothing happens.
Time meanders. There are floors to clean, letters to write, time to spend in isolation. The rule is: ‘No Talking’. Friendships appear, develop and fail, briefly. The institution staff organise a Film Night, and the inmates watch the films. Nothing happens.
But then, at night, the inmates dream. We see flashes of daydreams and nightmares; of a time when they can leave their silent, monochrome world and escape into music.
With a score written and provided live by The Staircase Band (as seen in Suitcase Cabaret and the Gnädiges Fräulein), Film Night is a new piece of theatre using barely any words. Silent and still scenes contrast with vivid musical flashes, offering glimpses into the existence of the institutionalised, told through whispers and movement.
- December 2008
The Revived Emmanuel Dramatics Society presents:
MACBETT by Eugene Ionesco
Corpus Christi Playroom 2nd-6th December 7.00pm
‘Both thought-provoking and funny Macbett is a play for our time’
Writing during the Cold War, Eugene Ionesco, the master of absurdism, transforms Shakespeare's sinister tragedy of ambition into a surreal and darkly comic tale for the modern audience. His lively parody is at once a fantastic satire and an angry commentary on 20th century life. Fusing elements of the theatre of the absurd and commedia dell'arte, Macbett will expose the corruptibility of the Everyman in a harrowingly dark, yet sharply comic production.
Director Celeste Dring cad57 Producer: Charlotte Sewell cas89
- November 2008
Prepare to be charmed as Shakespeare's playful comedy is given a dose of '40s glamour.
Back from the war, Don Pedro and his soldiers face battles of a romatic kind. Claudio is instantly smitten with the lovely hero. Benedick needs all his wits about him in the 'Merry War' he's waging with the sharp-tongued Beatrice.
Meanwhile, as the sinister Don John plots mischief and the spectacularly incompetent constables try to investigate, complications ensue with riotous results!
Can the couples overcome conflict and confusion to find true happiness?
- February 2008
In a drowsy Spanish courtyard, Marguerita recounts the mystery surrounding the death of her child. Meanwhile another mother is caught in a battle of wills with her daughter who has fallen in love with a girl. Bryony Lavery’s surreal and atmospheric play explores the threshold between love and oppression, past and present and the complexity of motherhood. As the old woman’s tale unfolds, we learn the darker secrets of her past and are forced to reconcile disgust and pity.
- February 2008
Winner of ‘Best Play’ at the 1987 National Student Drama Awards, American Eagle follows the eponymous superhero and his creators at Miracle Comics through the turbulent years of the twentieth century. Drawn up in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, American Eagle is created by Bob Hickson, and editor Weissmuller, to reignite patriotism. Eagle must first fight Nazism, and is then forced by a series of editors, each with their own agenda, to battle Communism, and then lead the troops into Vietnam. But can the American Dream, and American Eagle, survive intact? The Cambridge premiere of the revised version of this play sees a small cast portray dozens of characters in an action-packed comic-book adventure!
- November 2007
Come down the rabbit hole with The Revived Emmanuel Dramatic Society for this year's Freshers' Play: a wonderfully wacky interpretation of Lewis Carroll's classic novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, adapted for stage by Jeannette Jaquish. An eclectic cast of characters, from the femme fatale Queen of Hearts to the curious Caterpillar, will be delighted to transport you to a wonderland where nothing is quite what you expect. If you like jam tarts and possibly a bit of mayhem, Alice is the perfect way to end the term ...
- November 2006
The Revived Emmanuel Dramatic Society presents Ibsen's most arresting play. Feel the tension unfold as an image of domestic bliss begin to fall apart at the seams. Be swept away by the unstoppable rhythms of the Tarantella. Watch as Nora finally confronts her darkest secret.
A scathing attack on the gender roles associated with Victorian marriage, A Doll's House is often described as the first true feminist play. The REDS production of this Norwegian classic is sure to be one of the most exciting shows in Cambridge this term.
- June 2006
Tom can’t remember where he is. Everywhere he travels is identical - and anonymous. He and Joy grasp at any fleeting chance to connect. ELECTRONIC CITY is a surreal, physical piece that tracks Tom and Joy as their worlds fragment. Technology malfunctions; they are lost, confused, and rendered dysfunctional. What they ultimately need is one another: love and human contact. See ELECTRONIC CITY and FELUTOPIA as a double-bill for 5/4 pounds!
- June 2006
After an average farmer is forced to become president in peculiar circumstances, the recognition that he has a new power over other people's lives sparks a spiral of jockeying for power and control. Felix finds that he must fight to help the people and to maintain his position before ultimately confronting his biggest enemy: the color of his skin. See ELECTRONIC CITY and FELUTOPIA as a double-bill for 5/4 pounds!
- June 2006
Handbags, fopps and Oscar's wit will collide in this fast-paced, sumptuously designed Wildean romp. The old favourite's getting a Mayweek make-over and a live jazz band to soundtrack proceedings in the Emma gardens. We've sanded it down and re-painted it, now come and celebrate with a lot of laughs, a lot of style and a lot of cucumber sandwiches.
- February 2006
A dazzling night of sumptuous theatre. In the magical baroque of the Union Chamber a tangle of actors, musicians, artists and dancers devise a night of fairytale reality, working to alternately caress and manipulate the spectator with the macabre, the sublime and the tragic as, for the first time, Italo Calvino's kingdom of stories are brought to the stage. Tales of ecstasies and transfigurations, martyrs and tortures, horrors and seductions, lure the audience through a calculated delirium of brimming sensations. Total collaboration across an enormous body of talent works to create an exuberant night of drama reaching theatrical levels as yet unexplored by Cambridge students. Woven from a devised narrative, a plethora of dramatic influences, an original score that includes D.J's, classical guitarists and sopranos and a vibrantly creative new design scheme, this one night of theatre promises to be sensational.
- November 2005
- November 2005
Set in 19th Century Russia, THE CHERRY ORCHARD is both a searching social drama and an affectionate family portrait. It depicts the life of a once-rich land-owning family in a changing world. The cherry orchard itself becomes a symbol of the past that the family continue to cling to: once beautiful and distinguished, but now redundant and sacrificed to the forces of the social and economic change.
- June 2005
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is an epic fantasy deserving of reinvention, and this Mayweek show is not just endowed with the imaginative scale of a promenade performance. After entering the wardrobe with four children of the Blitz – Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter – the audience is confronted with the same living allegory, the same experience of a sky hung with inflated storm-clouds and a reel of bemasked mythical figures which dance them on to a conclusion of death and glory in the newly-thawed Spring.
Good and evil fight pitched battles in this, C.S. Lewis’s most known story, and stylisation becomes the vehicle to an absolute evocation of the brooding and magical world of Narnia; commedia dell’arte jostles an almost grotesque physicality, in an arena defined by concealed sound and overt landscape. This is the billowing tapestry of Narnia where children reign amongst witches and giants, lions and centaurs, hags and fauns, and through all, the sense of a skein drawn across, and shattered by stepping over the threshold.
- March 2005
A group of blundering actors are about to embark on a touring production of 'Nothing On' - a classic British farce. But on the night before the first performance, the play is far from ready to perform. Fluffed lines, misplaced sardines and the tension of backstage romances all contribute to the uproarious troubles of the production team. As the tour continues, events behind the scenes spiral out of control, and the predicament of the actors and crew becomes even more farcical than the play they are performing.
'Noises Off' firmly established Michael Frayn's position as an exceptional and perceptive dramatist, with its first production winning both the Evening Standard and the Olivier Award for Best Comedy of the Year. One of the truly great comedies of recent times, this frenzied farce is an unmissable piece of theatre from one of Britain's finest and most popular playwrights.
- March 2005
‘Beautiful, oh she’s beautiful. Who is she waiting for- no one for me-? Her neck soft as a baby’s thigh. I could bite valleys out of it. I could…’
A play that will revel and delight in the spectacular performance that is the drudgery of daily life. A play that will highlight the actor in all of us before wooing it out of the stage. While a man searches for someone to be honest to.
- February 2005
Cambridge's first ever burlesque extravaganza, THE CARDINAL CLUB, presents
a unique opportunity for you to be part of an exciting project while
supporting a new arts venture.
The Cardinal Club will be Cambridge’s most desired Valentine desination .
Drawing on the influences of the cabaret bars of 1930s Berlin, speakeasies
of the prohibition era and freakshows of Victorian England, it will create
a melting pot of weird and wonderful acts to delight, shock, tease and
shamelessly entertain.
The show will mix from a palette of magicians, comedians, singers, novelty
acts and classic vaudeville dancers. We will guide the audience through the
evening's cavalcade of entertainers, stitching together a non-stop show
that glides from the sensational to the bizarre.
- December 2004
Richard and Sarah seem to epitomise the respectable 1950s married couple. But beneath the bourgeois veneer lurk voracious sexual appetites. Sarah entertains a lover daily while Richard visits his whore. The deception at the core of their relationship eats away from within and the pretended life they have lived together for 10 years quickly disintegrates. ‘The Lover’ is above all about the relationship which can be the closest and also the most fraught of all: that between two lovers.
- November 2004
- November 2004
Violent, funny, smart -- and oiled with huge amounts of alcohol:
Edward Albee's classic portrait of marital war. George, a failed
academic, and his wife Martha have a young couple over for late
drinks, and quickly turn the unsuspecting guests into weapons in
their year-long marriage battle. Layer by layer, drink after drink,
each gives away the secrets of the other's failed life – neither of
them capable of stopping the process of mutual humiliation once it
has begun.
“Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is one of the strongest, most
psychologically violent, and yet subtlest pieces in modern theatre.
It shocks the audience not only by the intensity of its battles, but
also with the precision with which it presents them a mirror-image of
their own life. It is a highly entertaining, funny and violent
description of what it is for people to share each others’ lives, of
their intimacy, their contempt for each other, and their recognition
that they will nonetheless carry on together.
- June 2004
This Mayweek Emmanuel Fellows' Garden will be transformed into a magical
world, by turns terrifying and entrancing. Princesses and giants, magic
donkeys who spit out gold [from both ends] and cannibalistic witches will
haunt the shades of the bluebell-carpeted tree at 5pm every day from
Tuesday 14th to Saturday 19th June. The exquisitely beautiful and the
deformed, ethereal spirits and wild creatures will rub shoulders in stories
known to every child in their cot - with the sinister and the sexual put
back in, for your eyes only. Emmanuelites Archie Bland, Sophie Middlemiss,
Hanna Thomas, Tommy Eccleshare and Conrad Mason direct a singing dancing
ensemble of Cambridge's finest [and damn are they fine] in this
extravaganza of the imagination.
- June 2004
The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.
Jack and Earnest love Gwendolen. Algernon and Earnest love Cecily. Cecily
and Gwendolen love Earnest. And there are no more cucumber sandwiches...
May Week should be spent no other way than basking in glorious sunshine,
with tea and cake, being tickled by Oscar Wilde's timeless comedy of
loving, lying and lunching.
- February 2004
"Out Of Order" is a modern farce which matches witty dialogue with fast paced action.
- January 2004
Does this streetcar sound familiar? Well, here is a rare opportunity to see the original play, one of the most compelling in the history of American theatre. Tennessee William's acclaimed drama is a play of passionand tension that stages the darkest and most powerful theatrical emotions. It presents the brutal confrontation between death and desire, illusion and reality, poker and poetry. Life is a poker game and each performance will reshuffle the cards. The stage becomes a poker table - indeed a Playroom! - where the characters gamble their own desires, fears and shadows - or maybe yours. Don't miss it!
- November 2003
Pygmalion remains today a classic of the English stage. Having had audiences in fits of laughter since its premier in 1914, the play charts how Eliza Doolittle, the common flower-girl of Covent Garden, is transformed by Henry Higgins into a consort fit for a king.
Yet it is more than a modern fairy-tale. It is part of Shaw’s greatness that he can make us laugh while also making us think.
The inspiration for Lerner and Lowe's magical My Fair Lady, this production is a chance to re-discover afresh the myth that has fascinated generations, in all its Shavian complexity, vitality and comic ingenuity.
- October–November 2003
Cross Road Blues retells the story of legendary Delta Blues guitarist Robert Johnson. In a stark and poignant dialogue with a stranger one night, Robert must confront his fate. ‘The blues’ he pleads, ‘is almost everything.’ God, the devil and the desperate calls of a soul displaced by the pain of living fall together in one life changing crash. ‘And then what?’ replies the stranger, ‘and then what?’
Cross Road Blues has been written and directed by David Hall and stars Calvin Smith and James Purdon.
Calvin Smith is a professional actor who has appeared many times on Broadway and has toured shows nationally in America. This is his first appearance at the ADC. James Purdon is studying at Emmanuel College, and last appeared at the ADC in Oedipus.
- February 2003
- November 2002
- June 2002
- June 2000
